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March 10, 1999
Whitewashing Rudy Giuliani
by Robert Lederman, , President of A.R.T.I.S.T.
http://www.openair.org/alerts/artist/nyc.html
No one’s ever accused Rudy Giuliani of being modest. In fact, our hands-on
Mayor is widely known for taking credit where it isn’t due. There’s hardly a
sunny day in New York City that’s not listed on the Mayor’s resume as a personal
accomplishment. Yet, despite the facts in the Diallo case becoming more incriminating
every day for Giuliani the media has taken an abrupt u-turn in its coverage
on the issue. The whitewash of Rudy Giuliani is underway.
The reversal began with a carefully orchestrated press conference on February
25th. The Republican leader of the City Council, Tom Ognibene, led his six fellow
Republican Council Members in denouncing demonstrations being held throughout
the City to protest the killing of Amadou Diallo and the alleged racism of Giuliani
and the NYPD. Ognibene claimed that black and Latino New Yorkers had not shown
sufficient gratitude to the Mayor for crime reduction and other blessings he’s
brought to their community. The Council Republicans, all of whom are white,
also attacked the popular comparisons being made between Mayor Giuliani and
Hitler and claims that under Giuliani New York was becoming a fascistic police
state.
The image renovation campaign accelerated on 3/8 when virtually all mention
of Mayor Giuliani was omitted from coverage of a passionate anti-Giuliani demonstration
outside City Hall by Women for Justice. At the protest numerous speakers including
Diallo’s sister demanded that Giuliani resign from office. Speaker after speaker,
some of them mothers whose unarmed sons had been killed by the NYPD, denounced
the Mayor. On that evening’s news all negative images or mention of Giuliani
were eliminated. Instead, television viewers were bombarded with feel good shots
of Giuliani touching, hugging and laughing with black school Chancellor Rudy
Crew and honoring a black police officer from England who happened to incidentally
participate in a minor arrest. The next day’s newspapers were filled with images
of a broadly grinning Giuliani reading to minority children, touching Crew or
posing with the black English cop.
What’s especially telling about the switchover in coverage is the disconnect
between it and significant developments in the Diallo story that lead directly
to Rudy Giuliani. The Department of Justice is investigating the NYPD. A Congressional
Commission is being formed to study racism in American police forces, focusing
in particular on systemic problems in New York City. A lawsuit was just filed
charging the NYPD with racial profiling. The latest angle in the Diallo story
has officers from the Street Crimes Unit that killed the West African street
vendor ransacking his home and interrogating his roommate for six hours while
trying to “dirty up” or find incriminating evidence to damage his reputation.
Most bizarrely, the cops told Diallo’s roommate and cousin that they were being
taken to the precinct and questioned to find out “who” had killed him.
Giuliani has infuriated black New Yorkers by steadfastly defending the cops
in the elite all-white Street Crimes Unit. The unit’s own statistics show them
making more than 30,000 unjustified searches of minority males in the past year
alone. Giuliani further antagonized minorities when just days after the shooting
he announced that hollowpoint bullets, which cause far more severe injuries
than standard ammunition, would be issued to the NYPD. As the gulf between the
Mayor and minorities became more public it was revealed that in six years as
Mayor Giuliani had barely met with a single black elected official.
Is Giuliani to blame for the Diallo killing? As the most hands-on Mayor in
New York City history Rudy Giuliani micro-manages the NYPD and directs all of
it’s policy decisions. Since his election in 1993 there’s not a parking ticket
written that doesn’t have Giuliani’s fingerprints all over it. The Street Crimes
Unit was doing political work not police work the night they killed Amadou Diallo.
A number of high profile rapes were causing a blemish on the “crime is down,
God Bless Rudy Giuliani, he saved New York” theme. The Street Crimes Unit wasn’t
sent to Diallo’s neighborhood to stop rapes but to stop bad press. Normally
the NYPD barely investigates rapes in minority neighborhoods let alone calls
in the “elite” troops.
While racism is a problem that’s not unique to New York City, the racism associated
with Giuliani’s so-called quality of life campaign is. Minorities are the exact
population targeted by the Mayor’s policies on the homeless, on food stamps,
on school vouchers, on the taxi, street artist and vendor crackdowns, on the
massive illegal searches by police in minority communities, on the CUNY cutbacks
or on the fact that although New York has millions of black residents 96% of
its police captains are white.
The Mayor’s staff and the influential political and business leaders aligned
with him have been working overtime to silence negative Giuliani press coverage.
Phones in newsrooms across the City are ringing off the hook with calls from
those with the influence to censor the news.
The effects were obvious at the Women for Justice protest. Although the media
were there in force, many photographers kept their lens caps on during much
of the protest and barely took a picture. Network television camerapersons stood
on the outskirts of the protest for hours with their videocameras on the ground
or in bags. Virtually no interviews of protesters were done. The media apparently
was told to do as little coverage as possible, especially of anything referring
to Giuliani. They didn’t look happy about it either. Of the few photographers
and reporters that were doing interviews a number later complained that they’d
been harassed or obstructed by the police.
The next predictable step in the renovation of his image is for a black leader
to be brought forward to defend Giuliani’s racist policies. We can be sure that
the Mayor’s entire staff is desperately looking for a candidate to fulfill that
odious task at this very moment.
Robert Lederman, President of A.R.T.I.S.T.
(Artists’ Response To Illegal State Tactics)
255 13th Street
Brooklyn, N.Y. 11215
(718)369-2111
e mail ARTISTpres@aol.com
http://www.openair.org/alerts/artist/nyc.html
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